Category: Social Software

Carson of Buzzmetrics talks about the financial value currently hidden in the midlist. A blogger in the so-called midlist might be highly influential in their subcommunity.

One thing which I think might be interesting to add to the discourse, would be something around topicality. i.e. “influential on what?” Because BuzzMetrics is typically answering questions of influence within a commercial setting, we are rarely looking for “top bloggers.” We are looking for “top influencers amongst wireless application developers who happen to be positively inclined towards the Linux platform.”

Exactly. Many bloggers are not general celebrities but are influential in some domain. Compared to traditional research, blog search is a very low cost way of finding those networks of influence.

Lately, I’ve found that Technorati searches to find who’s responded to my posts have become unbearably slow. Often it takes a few searches in a row for results to show up.
A Technorati employee explained that they’ve got a problem in the queue to fix that affects only midlist blogs. Currently, searches are more efficient for blogs with a great many links, and those with only one or two links. Searches are painfully slow in the middle.
This makes Technorati less useful for conversation discovery, particularly for the people who desire it most. Will Wheaton is a celebrity with high link rank from adoring fans. He probably isn’t interested in talking back to all the fans who write about him, except in a selective “fan letter quote” manner. He’s probably most concerned with the size of the audience, because that helps drive the audience and word of mounth for his books and television shows.
Midlist bloggers probably care most about conversation discovery — they are blogging in order to participate in a conversation, and each cogent reference is valuable.
Whether the segment is valuable to Technorati depends on their business model. Niche blogs with subcommunity connections ought to have value — more value than can be unlocked yet. The question is whether Technorati’s customers are marketers and advertisers to whom they simply sell metrics — in which case it doesnt’ matter if the system performs poorly for the midlist. Or whether there’s value with those users directly, by showing ads to them or providing paid services.

In Mary Hodder’s roundup of comments on the discussion of community metrics, I agree wholeheardedly with Dina Mehta. Dina says that the value of Technorati to her is conversation discovery.

For instance, I have no interest in what my ranking on Technorati is, but I do visit it daily to see who is linking to me and how they might have progressed a thought. Yet, I’m not so happy when these get transformed into lists, ratings and rankings. Are you merely well-known, or well-read?

Yes, exactly. I use Technorati to see who responded to what I wrote, to discover distributed comments. I also use Technorati to find out who’s written about something I’m interested in at the moment. Then (if I have something to say), I’ll comment on their blog or link to them. Technorati is for discovering and continuing conversation.
Link rank is a not-so-interesting byproduct.

Chris Dent writesin praise of purple numbers. These paragraph-level identifiers enable re-use of content. Chunks of good ideas are locked inside larger units, within documents and discussion threads.
The benefit of purple numbers is that they unlock insights, increasing the liquidity and flow of ideas. The drawback is that they break apart arguments. Insights may be captured in paragraphs. But arguments are conveyed across multiple paragraphs. You need more than one paragraph to provide context, to set up a contrast, or to draw a causal connection.
Sometimes, picking apart the individual points is what’s needed to find the holes and strengthen understanding. Sometimes, picking at individual points is a sign of a flamewar — people are searching for points of disagreement. Picking at points can increase the quality of thought, or reduce the quality of thought by reducing the incentive to build toward a larger theme.
In general, the wiki form is conducive to concensus, by bringing people literally on the same page. It will be interesting to see how wiki+purple affects the quality of thought and level of agreement.

In response to Mary Hodder’s concern about “rankism”… I wonder whether rank is the wrong presentation, and clouds are right.
A cloud presentation would primarily show the communities that a blogger is in. It may show secondarily the influence strength within that community, but that should be secondary in the presentation.
A cloud presentation might enable navigation along topic axis. For my blog, you’d be able to traverse to social software and austin clouds.
Influence would be calculated within the cloud. So, Jon Lebkowsky would have separately-calculated influence level within Austin and environmental blog communities.
Perhaps the presentation would allow the browser to traverse communities. One could find “blogher”, and traverse to the “sepia mutiny” south asia community.
Time would be an interesting factor. Perhaps one could view the cloud by week, month, or year. See how participation ebbs and flows over time. A longer time frame would be interesting — I wonder whether other bloggers are “bursty” in their topics of interest. A long time frame would catch people who come and go.
In sum, a cloud presentation would avoid the worst of rankism, because it would focus on the community more than the individual, and allow a browser to traverse communities.

In a thoughtful essay, Mary Hodder explores what it will take for blog search to go beyond the “top 100 syndrome” to discover the interesting patterns of influence and community.

…this is about going beyond lists and links, to understand that the social relationships of expression between and across blogs is really about searching for a “metric for identity” or “metric for affiliation”, “metric for community”, or “metric for influence”.

Mary is ambivalent about creating new forms of “rankism”.

I have to say, I’ve resisted this for the past year, even though many people have asked me to work on something like this, because I hate rankism. I think scoring, even a more sophisticated version of it, akin to page-rank, is problematic and takes what is delightful about the blogosphere away, namely the fun of discovering a new writer or media creator on their terms, not others.

The algorithm would weight links in posts higher than blogroll links, and new blogroll links higher than old ones. It might include new terms like time read, comments, and topic score.
Hopefully, the tradeoff for more rank-ism is better discovery. This weekend, I spent some time exploring Sepia Mutiny – a group blog for South Asian writers – and its cousins, after meeting one of the authors at BlogHer. This form of indirect discovery is delightful. A tool that helps with such serendipity would hopefully be more like the joys of a used book search database, and less like “sororitization”, the turning of social groups into popularity contests.
I wonder whether rank is the wrong presentation, and clouds are right. Clouds would primarily show the communities that a blogger is in — and may show secondarily the influence strength of that community?

I got an email about a new blog search engine called Blogniscient, so I clicked through to try it.
On the home page, it tells me that the top 10 political bloggers are:
#1 Michelle Malkin
#2 Captains Quarter Blog
#3 Eschaton
#4 Powerline
#5 Crooks and Liars
#6 Austin Bay
#7 Think Progress
#8 TPM Caf�
#9 The Anchoress
#10 Daily Kos
You can drill down and find the top liberal and conservative blogs. Two clicks later, I find that the top liberal bloggers are (the list goes to 20):
Liberal Politics
#1 Crooks and Liars
#2 The Left Coaster
#3 Eschaton
#4 Think Progress
#5 Daily Kos
#6 TPM Caf�
#7 Talking Points Memo
#8 Political Animal
#9 The Huffington Post
#10 America Blog
So please, Mr. Search Engine. Tell me something I don’t know. I knew that Daily Kos and Atrios/Exchaton were very popular. I had no idea that Atrios was two places ahead of Kos, and… I don’t care. It’s not like baseball heading up to the playoffs, where there’s going to be a single winner.
Where are the good centrist blogs, like The Moderate Voice and Ambivablog? They don’t fit into the impoverished taxonomy, let alone sites like Booker Rising, a site focused on moderate-to-conservative African-Americans.
Here’s the problem. The top 40 blog list is boring. It’s stable. We know who they are. The job of a search engine is to tell the user something they don’t already know.
Splitting up the top 100 into big themes is somewhat more interesting than the general-purpose Technorati 100. It’s more meaningful to look at top political blogs, sci/tech blogs, entertainment blogs. But it’s still stable, and doesn’t convey much new information.
The top news stories is a bit more interesting, since that churns daily. That’s an interesting zeitgeist check, and may be worth checking back.
The bulk of the site misses the glory of the web. With a vast amount of human knowledge there for the mining, please tell me something I didn’t know already

danah boyd just made a striking point at Blogher.
The link algorithms that drive “Top 100” lists at Technorati and other services are based on a broad and shallow pattern of linking. This is characteristic of male patterns of networking. By contrast, characteristically female patterns of networking are smaller and denser.
The “Top 100” pattern recaps the hit-based attention and financial economics of the mass media. It just doesn’t measure the sub-communities that should be visible out of the “Long Tail.”
Mary Hodder says that she is assembling an algorithm that will highlight the subnetworks and the long tails, using critera like comments and interlinks.
This is needed. Today’s algorithms are missing communities of interest. And frankly, it’s missing opportunities for power and money.

Thanks, Chris Anderson for the kind words. I’ll have to repay them by explaining where he is wrong again.
Chris writes:

Technorati is a blog aggregator without a community

.
This is true when you use Technorati as a pure zeitgeist-check, to find what the blogosphere is dithering about today (Karl Rove and Windows Vista).
But it is false for one of the most interesting and valuable applications of Technorati — conversation discovery. Bloggers use Technorati to find which other blogs are responding to their posts, so they can continue the conversation.
In an era of comment spam, Technorati has become a primary method of knitting together cross-blog conversation. Technorati helps make conversations and subcommunities visible. The “community” of Technorati is not a feature of the service itself. But Technorati is a key, and hidden component of the blogosphere’s long-tail communities.

Chris Anderson writes a refreshing rant about the misuse of the Long Tail. But he’s partly wrong.
Anderson writes:

There are many distortions of the term, but the most common one is to use it as a newly-positive synonym for “fringe”. Invoking the Long Tail is not a magic wand to explain away the apparent lack of demand for what you’ve got. The Long Tail is not a get-out-of-jail-free card for poor-selling product. Or weak sectors. Or bad ideas.

Anderson goes on to say that business models that focus only on fringe content are doomed to fail. Effective “long tail business models”, like Amazon, combine popular content with niche content, and use the popular content to draw people in.
Anderson’s right — Indy-only online music services draw much less business than providers like Amazon that can use popular content as a draw. A customer might check out a Britney Spears album, and then use the recommendation engine to traverse to related and much less well-known music.
But Anderson is partly wrong. LiveJournal and Flickr disprove his theory. LiveJournal is an online journal community that has historically had a large population of young people. They congregate in social groups, often starting with people who are friends offline. The software gives users tools to control the level of privacy. A user can define which friends can see private content, what content to share with intimate friends, and what to share with the wider world. Similarly, Flicker is an online photo sharing community, where users can share photos with their friends and the world.
Cultural preferences are social. When people like strange music, unusual fashions, or minority religious practices, they most often do so with a subculture of like-minded folk.
This is hard to see in the mainstream commercial economy because of the history of technology. Until now, mainstream marketing has had two main kinds of choices.
* Mass media is used to reach wide audiences. Coarse-grained targeting is used to reach market segments — viewers of the Cooking Channel, or readers of Parenting Magazine. The audiences for these niches is still quite large, many thousands of people.
* Direct marketing is used to reach individuals. Direct postal mail, telemarketing, and legitimate targeted email is used to reach individuals who are selected by personal history (e.g. bought the product before), or by membership in a targeted demographic group.
Until now, the smaller social networks in which people share culture have been largely private and noncommercial, with a small number of exceptions, like Tupperware parties and Amway.
What’s worse, the content industry has done its best to make sure that social content-sharing is illegal. Rather than seeing opportunities in tools that let people share content, the industry sees all sharing as piracy, and tries to stamp it out.
So, the successful examples of social content-sharing are based on non-commercial content, like LiveJournal and Flickr. There are also grassroots networks of cross-linked music blogs where people review and recommend music. And there are networks of cross-linked knitting blogs where people review and recommend patterns. Classic long-tail stuff.
So, Chris Anderson is right that catalog retailers like Netflix and Amazon need to have hits, which help draw users to the niche. Their recommendation engines serve as an automated proxy for the natural social recommendations that people make every day.
But that’s true only when you start with the content. When you start with groups of people, then opportunities for “long tail” are abundant, and don’t depend quite so much on mainstream content.